by Cara Black
With those hollow cheekbones, Annika had looked about to cave in.
“How can I help?”
“Raise your arms.” He began lifting off her white T-shirt.
“Michel, what are you doing?”
“Don’t worry about your weight, that’s easy to disguise,” he said with a mouthful of pins. At least that’s what she thought he said. “Step out of your skirt, into this.”
“Don’t get ideas,” she said, startled. She hadn’t shaved her legs in two weeks!
“See, I drape the fabric, pin a dart here.”
Sharp jabs poked her skin. “I’m a computer geek, not a model.”
“You’re a model now,” René said, handing her a palette of pressed shadows and blushes. “Hair and makeup is new to me, too!”
“Do this and you save my life,” Michel said. “My uncle predicts a failure. This is my chance to show them a Sentier titi can do a couture show. For years the fabric dealers have laughed at me, called me a freak, a dreamer, saying, ‘No one ever goes from wholesale to couture!’”
She couldn’t disappoint him.
“What do I do?”
“Attitude,” Michel said, as he pinned and sewed the fabric. “Show attitude.” Akiva, Michel’s cousin, had appeared and was on his knees hemming the silk.
“And don’t breathe.”
“Don’t breathe?”
“No deep breaths. The stitching’s temporary.”
So she was being sewn into a dress like Marilyn Monroe. Michel, his cap back on his head, white eyebrows lowered in concentration, stitched her into a symphony of gray: a gunmetal butter-smooth leather bustier with billowing strips of charcoal silk as a skirt. He completed the ensemble with crocodile pumps and thick strands of Tahitian black seed pearls around her neck. The effect, an avant-garde blend of classic and streetwise, was stunning.
“Follow the Goth model,” he said. He gestured toward an alabaster-skinned woman with huge black-ringed eyes and lips, who was wearing a spiderweb confection of a gown. “Do what she does.”
’arry, his other assistant, had two big makeup brushes in his hands and was powdering her face, hollowing her eyes with charcoal shadow.
“My hair?”
René stood on a spindly-legged chair and scattered silver sparkles over her hair. “Now comb it through with your hands…. Perfect, the windswept lunar look!”
Voices and the sound of opening and closing doors came from the other room.
“The musician, I hope.” Michel rushed off.
“How many outfits do I wear?”
“We’re hoping Annika comes to and we can give her fluids,” Akiva grinned. “Then she can finish the show.”
Another model ran in, stripped off her raincoat, and stepped into a waiting dress. “Sorry, I’ve done three shows today, I came from Zaza’s as fast as I could.”
At least there were three of them to model for Michel now and the other models’ clothes had been designed for them.
The clients had begun to arrive. Aimée took a few steps and tried not to breathe deeply. She saw how easily she could pass out. Akiva led her to the curtained door.
“Thrust your hips forward, keep your knees together, stare straight ahead. Whatever you do, don’t smile!”
“Go ahead of me, I trip easy,” Aimée said to the pigtailed rollerblader with the laptop strapped on, who sucked a lollipop. This eclectic show was definitely couture contra couture.
“Remember, don’t smile,” said Akiva. “Pout!”
Michel planted a kiss on her cheek, then shoved her beyond the velvet curtain into a glaring spotlight. For a moment, she was blinded by the hot light. Strains of griot music came from her left. She took a step and tottered on the four-inch crocodile pumps. Gritting her teeth and trying to pout, she righted herself, slanted her hips, and prayed her knees weren’t knocking together.
The small gold chairs had filled with a variety of people. Flashbulbs were forbidden, but several men in the front row had sketch pads. The majority of the women were bon chic bon genre types who, in their designer suits, looked like they could afford couture. A few older women wore Yves Saint Laurent but the majority were under forty and their eyes lit up. Like jaded predators at a feast, they were always looking for what was fresh and unique. A ripple of applause greeted the Goth model.
When Aimée reached the first row of chairs, the rollerblader swooped beside her. The rollerblader made her way among them, pointing to the dress numbers on her laptop. The audience laughed and applauded loudly.
Aimée kept following the Goth model. Walking like a slant-board hurt her thighs. And she had to pee. Damn it, why hadn’t she gone before?
Loud applause greeted them.
The hot light followed her. She hoped she wasn’t sweating in the silk. That’s when she realized the heavy curtains draped the windows that overlooked the Palais Royal garden. And heard the familiar sounds of a kora accompanying a plaintive song, a mixture of French and Wolof. Like a sad love song.
Somehow it all worked: the luxurious rooms, the mix of outrageous and ultrafeminine, and the weaving rollerblader with the high-tech ordering system.
The audience appeared transfixed. And then Aimée saw the honey-colored face of the musician behind the dried palm screen, reflected in the tall mirror.
Idrissa.
Friday Noon
STEFAN ENTERED THE FLEABAG hotel, the kind rented by the hour. He hadn’t stayed in a hotel for years, but doubted the police checked the registers here.
And it was in a perfect location, standing on the edge of the Sentier. Leaning seemed a more appropriate word. Little had changed from the fifteenth century, Stefan figured, except for the ocher-painted Sheetrock and inexplicable fluorescent pink trim inside the foyer. The closet-sized hotel reception, illuminated by only a dim blue light, held room keys hung on nails from the greasy back wall.
“Anyone here?” he asked.
In the background, a conversation in Turkish continued without stopping.
He leaned on the thin board that served as a counter. “Service, s’il vous plaît!” he said louder.
The conversation paused, a door opened, and a small mole of a man appeared. He held a bottle of vinegar in one hand and a flashlight under his arm. Stefan wondered what the vinegar was for.
“Sign here,” he said without looking at Stefan, shining the flashlight on the ledger.
Stefan scribbled something illegible below all the other illegible signatures.
“How long?” the man asked.
“I’ll pay for the night.” Stefan shoveled one hundred francs into the waiting palm. “I’d like a room with a view. Street view.”
The man pulled a key from a nail. “Number 49, top floor.” His small molelike eyes raked over Stefan for the first time. “Enjoy your stay.”
Stefan took his time mounting the creaking wood stairs. He paused and listened. No one followed so he kept going. On the top landing was a pile of stained sheets.
Stefan unlocked the door. The previous occupants hadn’t left long before. He smelled cheap perfume and the mildew from the damp bathroom. He pulled the tattered lace curtain over the glass, then opened the window, hoping to avoid other pungent odors.
The faded rose chenille bedspread, rucked and torn on the bottom, barely covered the mattress. Tired, he sank down on the wooden chair.
Outside the sweltering room’s windows, rue Beauregard resounded with the blare of a car alarm going off and a loud conversation being held across the narrow street. Stefan dimmed the one bed lamp, draping a towel over the patched, yellowed shade. It cast a muted cocoa light over the room.
He pulled the wooden chair with uneven legs to the window and trained his eye on the lighted windows in Action-Réaction’s headquarters. He’d been underground for so long he felt like the feral urban creature he’d become. Jumping at every noise his limited hearing registered, wary of every glance or comment.
Funny, twenty years later, he was back in almost the same
spot. Again in the Sentier, near the cache. Or so he assumed.
His mind went back to the journey from the château with Jutta and Beate. It had taken them several hours to drive from Mulhouse, near the German border, to Paris.
In the rearview mirror Stefan had watched the two of them sorting and rooting through the papers. At least they’d driven out of Mulhouse without being followed. But Stefan kept checking.
“Figeac’s sympathetic to the cause, his wife, too. We leave him the papers and some of the money. Figeac puts it all in a safety deposit box,” Jutta said. “Slowly, when we need it, he sends some to us. No one’s the wiser.”
“Look at all this stuff,” Beate had said, pulling dossiers and bundles of papers from a garbage bag. Her eyes widened. “Property and mine ownership in Africa. He’s a bigger rat than we thought.”
The papers blew all over since the windows had been opened to get rid of the smell of Laborde’s blood.
“We can’t do anything with African land deeds,” Beate said.
“Not now,” Jutta said. “But down the road, who knows?”
Jutta lifted up several stacks of compact paper bundles. Her face cracked into a smile. “Bearer bonds. We can do a lot with these.”
“Can’t they trace them?” Stefan asked.
“Not bearer bonds like these.” She threw a wad over the seat onto his lap. “My God, there’s more. Another box! He must have intended to pay people in bonds. So no one could trace them.”
And, looking back, Stefan realized that was the moment. The moment he sensed that for him, Beate, and Jutta, the Revolution had changed.
“How can all these fit into a safety deposit box?” Beate asked.
“We just need to find a safe place and dip in from time to time.”
They were fugitives in a Mercedes speeding into Paris, with loads of untraceable bearer bonds and Pink Floyd blaring on the radio.
Stefan had never been more thrilled in his life.
Arriving in Paris, he’d parked in a garage around the corner from Romain Figeac’s apartment. For all Figeac’s liberal tendencies, once they arrived at his door, he seemed nervous and then point-blank refused to help them. Told them to leave.
But when his wife saw them she welcomed them with open arms. She jumped into the fray, calling it the first real worthwhile thing Figeac could do with his life. The rest of the time she spent shaming him into hiding them, into participating in “the most exciting and life-changing event ever to happen to them.”
Events, Stefan realized, proved her right.
Liane Barolet, an Action-Réaction groupie dressed in black, dropped by, en route to her mother’s funeral. And that’s when, sitting on the floor with a magnum of champagne on ice in Figeac’s son’s sand bucket, they came up with the idea.
“There are empty vaults in my family’s mausoleum,” Liane had said. “Who’d look there?”
Thinking back on it over the years, Stefan had figured Liane hadn’t wanted to be the only one at her mother’s funeral in her melancholy state. Nothing deeper or more revolutionary than that. And they drank champagne all afternoon, which probably helped.
Liane, Jutta, and Beate divvied up the contents of the plastic bags in Romain’s son’s bedroom. A holiday atmosphere reigned. They left the uncashable items in the little boy’s toy chest for Romain to deposit in the bank.
He had erupted later, after he found the radicals playing with his son. Stefan felt sorry for the little boy with the big eyes who craved attention from his tipsy mother. She’d ignore him, then smother him with kisses after he’d become engrossed in a puzzle. Erratic, immature, but a breathtaking blonde.
She made a game of outfitting them in all the black clothing in her closets, then hiring a limo to ferry them to the funeral. Figeac had refused to attend.
Twenty years later, the funeral remained a haze to him. A wild haze. The simple ceremony consisted of the grave digger announcing, upon seeing the crowd, that he’d return later to seal the crypt.
Stefan had stayed outside in the sunlight with the little boy, who chased butterflies among the tombs. He never knew how it transpired that Liane’s mother ended up in another vault while the bonds and most of the remaining contents of the plastic bags were entombed in the musty casket bearing her name, Emilie Barolet.
On the way back, the limo was stalled in traffic: a routine police check on drivers. But they’d panicked. Jutta jumped out of the car with Beate, tugging a bag between them. They ducked behind construction on the Metro. All he remembered was a medieval tower of sandstone.
Back at the apartment, Romain Figeac had greeted Stefan with an ultimatum.
Leave.
The police had identified the Mercedes in the garage around the corner. Not only that, they had rough composite sketches of them from descriptions by Laborde’s staff. By the time Jutta and Beate turned up at the apartment, Figeac insisted on driving all of them to a suburb outside Paris to fend for themselves. They were to take a bus to the safe house and meet the other terrorists there.
His actress wife winked when they left, implying she could handle her husband and the safe deposit box. But en route, when Jutta told Figeac about the cache in his son’s toy chest, he pulled over and pounded the steering wheel.
“If my wife acts crazy, that’s one thing,” he said. “Don’t involve my son.”
“Look, we’ve laid our life on the line for the Revolution,” Jutta said. “Struck a blow for the proletariat against a scumbag Nazi collaborator who’s stealing diamonds from our African brothers.”
Stefan had never heard Jutta so political, so impassioned, or so drunk.
“The cause needs your help to continue!”
Later on, when Romain Figeac found out his wife was pregnant by one of them, Jules Bourdon, he cooperated.
But Stefan knew it was with hate in his heart. And, after his wife’s suicide over the miscarriage, with revenge in his mind.
For the first five years, Stefan hid deep underground, moving all the time. He was terrified. But for the past fifteen years, he’d dipped into the coffin modestly, always leaving a pile of cash for Jutta or Liane or Beate. The wads of bonds had never varied, until now. Now they were all gone.
Friday Afternoon
SHOCKED AT FINALLY SEEING Idrissa, Aimée caught herself before she tripped. She surveyed the girl through the fringed palm leaves. Upon closer scrutiny, she saw that Idrissa wore a colorful African head scarf while, with quick strokes, she plucked the long-handled kora.
At least some luck shone on Aimée. Idrissa sat in the rear, behind a palm-leaf screen, adjusting a microphone and small amplifier. She wouldn’t be going anywhere for awhile. Aimée slid in beside her.
“No more avoiding me, Idrissa,” she said. “We’re going to talk. I just helped Khalifa identify Ousmane at the morgue.”
Fear registered in the girl’s eyes. A wide gulf of panic.
“You were the target, not Ousmane, weren’t you?”
“Not now, we can’t talk now,” Idrissa whispered.
“What was Romain Figeac working on? I must know.”
Idrissa gasped, “He was crazy. I didn’t understand what he wrote.”
“Why don’t I believe you?” Aimée pressed her face close to Idrissa’s. “You’re in danger, so am I.”
Michel beckoned her frantically, pointing to a shimmering outfit. Frustrated, she wanted to handcuff Idrissa to the Doric column or eighteenth-century harpsichord behind her. Keep her here.
“Please, you must wait for me, Idrissa!”
Idrissa nodded.
If the girl fled again, she’d hunt her down with wolfhounds this time.
Aimée stepped into an urban chic black silk tunic decorated with embroidered white lilies and antique Lanvin buttons. The chalky face powder of the Goth designer and a cloying perfume made her sneeze.
Michel looked up in horror. “Don’t sneeze again.”
She pinched her nose. “I’ll try not to. Any orders, Michel?”
“You have a new career, Aimée,” René grinned. “But if you’re serious you have to stop eating and start smoking again.”
Not a bad idea, she thought. Did chocolate count?
She kept her eye on Idrissa as she catwalked. The rollerblader seemed busy with clients, and she was glad for Michel.
Her last outfit was a miniskirt of fine silver metal mesh, reminiscent of a knight’s chain mail, along with an off-the-shoulder gauze lace top. Michel draped the lace around her lizard tattoo.
“Parfait!” said the Goth designer, admiring her back. “The Marquesan lizard symbolizes change … the perfect accessory.”
Was her life going to change, Aimée wondered, as she cat-walked past the palm screen.
Annika, Michel’s premier model, had revived and now appeared in his variation of the traditional last outfit, the wedding gown. An off-white creation of pearlescent beads embroidered an old-fashioned lace twenties style tunic with a train of tiny ivory ostrich feathers draping down her back. Michel’s low bow met with resounding applause.
Aimée gestured to Idrissa, indicating a mirrored corridor outside the salon’s door.
“Let’s finish our conversation.”
Idrissa’s eyes were large with panic, but she set the kora in its case and stood up.
“Out here, away from the crowd,” she said.
After the hot lights and buzz of the collection, Aimée welcomed the stale air and creaking wood floor. She leaned against the wall, about the same height as Idrissa, in the crocodile pumps. Their reflections, Idrissa in her bright African head scarf and Aimée in the chain-metal-mesh mini, kaleidoscoped in the grainy half-silvered mirrors.
“Talk to me, Idrissa, tell me why you’re in danger. I won’t hurt you.”
Idrissa’s eyes filled with tears. “You killed Ousmane!”
Aimée blinked in surprise. “What gives you that idea?”
“Because you wouldn’t stop looking for me,” Idrissa said.
Talk about guilt transference. “Listen, Idrissa, Christian hired me to find out about the ‘ghosts,’ but I discovered that his father didn’t commit suicide,” Aimée said, with effort keeping her voice patient. “His father was killed. You’d worked with Romain but you wouldn’t talk with me. You ran away. I tried to call you but I couldn’t find you. Then I went to Club Exe. No one had seen you. And in the square beyond, a titi kicked a soccer ball into a garbage bag by mistake and there was poor Ousmane.”
